So killing an injured animal on the side of the road is a good thing because it shortens the animal's suffering, but feeding humanely-killed (read: quick deaths, suffering minimized) frozen mice is a bad thing? Road deaths, in the modern world, are as much a part of the "natural" wildlife experience as live mice falling prey to snakes. Your instincts to shorten the suffering of the hurt animals on the side of the road is commendable: having the same sensitivity for our animals' food items seems the same.



A different tack: Would it bother anyone to see nice big -- and live -- tiger salamanders being put on fishhooks as bait?



Anyway, i think the principle we're discussing is the same as our being able to choose euthanasia vs dying in any of the horrific ways millions of humans have died, with suffering dragged out for hours, days, weeks or months. I noticed how quickly this thread turned into a "big government taking away my freedoms" issue for a few: Surely euthanasia should be a right as much as ground-to-air missile ownership? How does that relate to food items?



A tangent: I heard a crash on my patio a week ago, like someone banging galvanized tubs together. I first thought someone was trying to break in. At almost the same moment the doorbell rang. The fella at the front door told me a deer had been hit out front, and ran down my driveway. He'd called the police and thought I should know. So now i knew what the noise was. I followed the cop down the driveway and we found the deer had skidded around a corner onto the patio, knocked my heavy metal six-person patio table about 8' into my big grille, knocking it another couple feet. The animal was hurt, and panicked. I was lucky it didn't come thru the patio doors. Luckier still, we weren't having a cookout that night, or people would have been badly hurt. Our flashlights picked up the deer walking in the back of my lot (75 feet away). It seemed ok; I'm hoping it survived.

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